Chapter 13. Implementing Master Pages and Page Layouts
Working with dynamic Web templates
Implementing master pages
Managing page layouts
Designing Web sites entails that you consider a number of techniques to ensure uniformity and consistency in the formatting and branding of the Web pages. It's important to ascertain that users browsing through the Web pages of a Web site feel a sense of standardization while navigating between various Web pages. You might not want to have Web pages inside a Web site presenting content in a manner that's totally oblivious of the presentation style of the entire Web site. For example, you may want to always have the navigation links and bars at the same location on the Web pages of the Web site so that when the user navigates around pages, he or she doesn't feel confused.
While CSS is a key technology that helps you maintain a consistent look and feel for your Web site, it applies mostly to styling, fonts, and formatting. SharePoint Designer allows you to make use of a number of other technologies, such as dynamic Web templates (DWTs), master pages, and page layouts to help you maintain a standard branding and layout across all the Web pages.
Although the implementation of the aforementioned technologies might be different, the concept behind them is similar. You mostly follow these steps to create Web site content by using these technologies:
You create a template Web page that suits the requirements of your Web site's design. In this template page, you define a uniform blueprint that's implemented for the entire Web site or a set of pages inside the Web site. Usually, this is the time when you decide where to place common elements, such as branding images, navigation components and link bars, headers and footers, etc.
After you place the common elements, you create unique areas in the template page to hold content that's unique to the Web pages based on the template.
You then create new Web pages based on the template page. These Web pages inherit the common elements of the template page and allow editing of the unique areas only.
While designing Web pages in this fashion, the concept described previously is enforced by the editing tool, which in this context is SharePoint Designer. SharePoint Designer allows you to create template pages by using dynamic Web templates (DWTs), master pages, and page layouts. You can define the design, formatting, and common elements on the template pages by using the available tools. Then, you can either create new Web pages based on the template pages or attach the template pages to existing Web pages.
After attaching the Web page to the template page, it inherits the formatting and layout of the template page. The Design view in SharePoint Designer doesn't allow you to modify the common elements that the Web page inherits from the template page. You can only make modifications to the unique areas you defined in the template page. This ensures that all the common elements from the template page are and stay enforced on the attached Web pages.
To modify the common elements, you need to modify the template page. When you save the template page after modifications, the attached Web pages are automatically updated to inherit the modifications. So, rather than having to make modifications to every page, you modify only one template page and then the changes are applied to all attached Web pages. In this way, this concept reduces redundancy and provides you with an efficient way to maintain your Web pages.